Website monitoring

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martyyn

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#130689 24-Sep-2013 11:08

I run a couple of websites through JoneSolutions after a couple of suggestions from here but in the last couple of months I've had a few problems with a couple of the sites.

I bought one of the basic reseller accounts and host a couple of sites on it for local businesses and have a couple of subdomains for me to play with. There is plenty of diskspace and plenty of bandwidth, were talking about helping friends out rather than major business !

At the moment I have two sites giving 500 Internal Server Errors, one site saying 'Page not Found' and one site with Google saying it doesn't exist. All domains are active (and done through 247 Hosting again with recommendations from here).

Last month JoneSolutions suggested I use intoNDS and at the moment it doesnt appear to show any problems (although I'll be honest some of what it returns means nothing to me) but I cant access the site.

So my question is what should I be using to monitor these sites to be notified when they are down ?

I'm just looking for something simple to start with so I can at least find out where the problem is and I'll start looking deeper as I go.

Many thanks.

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#901767 24-Sep-2013 11:12

Check out www.pingdom.com, they offer a pretty cool / easy service.

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Inphinity

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#901769 24-Sep-2013 11:14

You could use Pingdom, they're cheap enough and good. I have heard good things about Monitor.Us as well, though haven't used them personally yet.

BinaryLimited

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#901773 24-Sep-2013 11:17

with regards to your problem solving issue, it might be useful to implement newrelic on your server to monitor errors etc.
www.newrelic.com

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BinaryLimited

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#901782 24-Sep-2013 11:22

o and you get a free shirt....and a $20usd voucher :)
also, it has a free and paid service...depending on what you want...free seems more than generous with its functions

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freitasm

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#901795 24-Sep-2013 11:37

Pingdom won't help you solve 500 errors. You either put something in the stack (NewRelic will need some coding/server changes) or you will use some web server trace tool (such as the IIS Failed Requests Trace).

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martyyn

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#901799 24-Sep-2013 11:42

Thanks everyone.

To start with I just want something to monitor the sites. I'd like to know when they are down so I can do something about it.

For now, I've just raised a ticket with JoneSolutions to say the sites are down. Once I've set up Pingdom for them I'll start looking into the errors. I'm wondering if raising a ticket is the only thing I can do, I still want to go there with more information than I currently have though.

I'm still happy to hear suggestions. This is something I know little about and I'm keen to learn.

BinaryLimited

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#901800 24-Sep-2013 11:42

martyyn: I run a couple of websites through JoneSolutions after a couple of suggestions from here but in the last couple of months I've had a few problems with a couple of the sites.

I bought one of the basic reseller accounts and host a couple of sites on it for local businesses and have a couple of subdomains for me to play with. There is plenty of diskspace and plenty of bandwidth, were talking about helping friends out rather than major business !

At the moment I have two sites giving 500 Internal Server Errors, one site saying 'Page not Found' and one site with Google saying it doesn't exist. All domains are active (and done through 247 Hosting again with recommendations from here).

Last month JoneSolutions suggested I use intoNDS and at the moment it doesnt appear to show any problems (although I'll be honest some of what it returns means nothing to me) but I cant access the site.

So my question is what should I be using to monitor these sites to be notified when they are down ?

I'm just looking for something simple to start with so I can at least find out where the problem is and I'll start looking deeper as I go.

Many thanks.

can you list the websites here?

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ptinson

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#901802 24-Sep-2013 11:44

Inphinity: You could use Pingdom, they're cheap enough and good. I have heard good things about Monitor.Us as well, though haven't used them personally yet.

I have used both of these, they are both good as simple checks.
I have also used websitepulse and a few others to do more detailed testing. newrelic looks very interesting.

500 errors are server side, so you will really need to go dumpster diving through your logs looking for what is going on as mentioned by a couple of people.

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martyyn

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#901804 24-Sep-2013 11:46

These two have 500 Internal Server Errors:
andrewlondon.co.nz
jenniferturnbull.co.nz

Google tells me this one doesn't exist:
bloominggorgeous.co.nz

jarledb

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#901816 24-Sep-2013 11:55

I use http://www.statuscake.com/ - They even have checks from NZ and you can check for a lot of different things (look for content that is supposed to be on the site etc).

As for bloominggorgeous.co.nz - the name servers that are listed for the domain weren't answering with any information until very recently - I am guessing you have gotten the DNS fixed now?

BinaryLimited

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#901817 24-Sep-2013 11:55

martyyn: These two have 500 Internal Server Errors:
andrewlondon.co.nz
jenniferturnbull.co.nz

Google tells me this one doesn't exist:
bloominggorgeous.co.nz

cant ping bloominggorgeous.co.nz ...... check nameservers etc

do you have .htaccess files for these sites ( andrewlondon.co.nz . jenniferturnbull.co.nz )

Are you running linux or windows on your server?

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BinaryLimited

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#901820 24-Sep-2013 11:56

version: 5.00

query_datetime: 2013-09-24T11:52:40+12:00

domain_name: bloominggorgeous.co.nz

query_status: 210 PendingRelease

your domain has expired, renew it asap...

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Inphinity

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#901821 24-Sep-2013 11:57

martyyn: These two have 500 Internal Server Errors:
andrewlondon.co.nz
jenniferturnbull.co.nz

Google tells me this one doesn't exist:
bloominggorgeous.co.nz

bloominggorgeous.co.nz has expired

query_datetime: 2013-09-24T11:55:25+12:00

domain_name: bloominggorgeous.co.nz

query_status: 210 PendingRelease

The first two, you're going to need to look at what the default pages are trying to do that is causing an error. Are they PHP pages? What are they trying to do? What has been changed since they worked (presuming they worked at some stage)?

BinaryLimited

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#901829 24-Sep-2013 12:04

if you are using a linux ditro....try remove .htaccess files located ion the root folder and see if that fixes your errors, if thats the case then you know it has something to do with the .htaccess files.

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martyyn

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#901836 24-Sep-2013 12:14

Woooops bloominggorgeous is my wife's site. She tells me she received the renewel email last week but didn't think she needed to do anything !

The other two both have htaccess, andrews was updated last month (not by me), Jennifers back in Feb. I'll delete both and see what happens

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